Archives

It’s not an open casting call, Angela Cassano realizes as she takes in the emptiness of director Glenn Lancaster’s outer office. The gloomy space, on the second floor over storefronts on Santa Monica in Beverly Hills, has rough stucco walls painted off-white. The furnishings are chrome and ebony and black leather, and the stale air smells faintly of cigar. Her appointment was at two. At three she’s still waiting for Lancaster to emerge from his inner sanctum.

“They want you,” her agent had said when he called, sounding as surprised as she was that a remake of A Scandal in Bohemia was afoot, this time as a major motion picture. Same director, same actor as Sherlock Holmes, and they wanted her to read for the role she played twenty-five years ago: Irene Adler, the one woman who outsmarted the great detective.

Irregular

By Meg Gardiner

Suicide, they say. She hears them outside as she leans towards the open window.

The woman in pearls mumbles it, sitting on the curb under city lights. Her face scratched by fragments of safety glass, posh frock bloody. She waves away the paramedic again, insisting she’s fine, but refuses to look there.

The footballer spits it, pacing the pavement, mobile to his ear, speaking to his agent. Pausing to beg a cigarette from a cop guarding the scene. Still so shaky ninety minutes after the thing, he doesn’t care if onlookers snap him smoking. He’d just pulled up in the Merc when it happened. Jesus. Nearly killed us.

The dog walker sobs it. Yes, I saw, she tells the detective, wiping her eyes. She had no warning. The woman simply plunged from the night sky into the windscreen of the Mercedes outside the Mayfair Capital Bank. Straight down into the glass, from… she looks up at the window.

Shaz jerks back into the shadows.

The Painted Smile

by William Kent Krueger

He was an odd child to begin with. After he received the book as a Christmas present, things only got worse. Eventually his aunt was beside herself and sought my help.

I have an office in Saint Paul, in a building that was grand about the time Dillinger was big news. It’s long been in need of a facelift. One of the things I like about it is that I can see the Mississippi River from my window. Another is that I can afford the rent.

Although she’d called ahead and had explained the situation, when she brought in the boy, I was still surprised. He was small, even for a ten-year-old. But his eyes were sharp and quick, darting like bees around the room, taking in everything. I welcomed the woman and her nephew, shook their hands, and we sat in the comfortable easy chairs I use during my sessions.

The last couple of samples from Echoes of Sherlock Holmes, and these are goodies.

Raffa

by Anne Perry

It was one of the nicest hotels in London. The dining room was suitably lush, sombre and filled with the chink of china and the delicate odours of coffee and bacon, but Marcus St. Giles was unimpressed with it. His fame as the current television Sherlock Holmes had accustomed him to such places. He would rather have eaten at a transport café, and played Hamlet, brilliantly, to a single audience. There was no passion in Sherlock Holmes, not a great deal of complexity that had not already been explored a hundred times.

He was making money, but he had lost enjoyment, purpose. It was all automatic, a caricature more than an art. There was no life in it.

“Please, sir…”

He looked up. She was standing a few feet away from him, wide eyes staring at him solemnly. She looked to be about seven or eight years old—a child! A small, thin child with long hair and clothes which did not match.

“You are Sherlock Holmes,” she said in little above a whisper.

He drew in his breath to try to explain to her that he was Marcus St. Giles, playing Sherlock Holmes on television. Sherlock Holmes was an imaginary character, not a real person. He never had been real.

But she cut him off. “Please, sir, Mr. Holmes, my mummy has been kidnapped and I need you to help me.”

The dean of black empowerment lay dead on the worn throw rug. A ragged bullet hole violated Professor Lincoln Barrow’s wrinkled forehead. He was dressed in slacks and slippers, a ratty robe splayed open over an athletic T-shirt covering his pot belly. Near his outstretched hand was the spilled cup of tea he’d been holding. The stuff had soaked into the rug, the cup and saucer amazingly unbroken though the summation was he’d dropped to the floor instantly after being shot.

“That was part of a set C.L.R. James had given him,” said the beefier of the two men who stood looking down at the body. He meant the fine china items on the floor. “He mentioned it to me once,” he added, as if that meant the murdered man had shared a confidence.

The one he told this to was also over six feet. He had shoulders like a linebacker, thick Fu Manchu mustache, modest sideburns and hair flattened on top and close-cropped at the sides, what they called a “fade” in uptown barbershops. John “Dock” Watson turned from the body and began inspecting the spacious room–chamber he supposed it would be called in The Post. Two walls were composed of tall built-in bookshelves. On those packed shelves were numerous first and rare editions, from W.E.B. DuBois’ The Soul of Black Folk to Capital by Karl Marx and a personally signed copy of I am not Spock by the actor Leonard Nimoy.

The Adventure of the Dancing Women

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

“It’s the end of literacy as we know it,” I complained. I leaned back in my swivel chair, plonked my black boots on my desk, and glimpsed the last of the Wednesday sunrise, wisps of pale lavender, still visible behind the coppery foliage of our town’s famous beeches. This morning, however, I was lured from our front window and the glorious autumn by the curious email that had pinged onto my computer. I studied it, perplexed. I recognized the sender, but there was no subject line, nor were there words in the message section. The page showed only a colorful jumble of tiny graphic symbols.

“Clearly, the human need for language is threatened, do you not agree? Once we descend into ambiguous shorthand?” I reached for my white mug of oolong, grumbling, not taking my eyes from the screen, then removed my tortoiseshell spectacles, wiped away an annoying speck of dust with my handkerchief and put the glasses back on. “What, pray tell, does a smiley-face mean? ‘I’m only teasing’? Or, ‘I’m happy’? Or, ‘you win’?”

“You’re becoming a curmudgeon at age 30, girlfriend,” Watson warned. She placed her laptop on her desk, flipped the computer open. It trilled into life, and I heard Watson tapping keys as she talked. “By forty you’ll be totally ancient.”

Miss Cordelia Grant did not mourn the world of damp dressing rooms, damper lodgings and Sunday travel in a third-class railway carriage. True, her current role – lady’s maid to Mrs Gilver – was performed on a smaller stage than that of even the lowliest provincial theatre and her cast of one worked hard at thwarting most of her best ideas when it came to costume but still she thought herself lucky. There were men marching for work, women queuing for bread and soup, and her parents’ little acting company was reduced to church halls and social clubs. Miss Grant was accordingly grateful for her settled home, steady wage, and security.

Sometimes, however, the quiet comforts of rural Perthshire in wintertime failed to satisfy appetites formed during a theatrical childhood and Miss Grant’s efforts to supplement those comforts only made her chafe the more.

Today was typical. Moriarty, wheeled out during the matinee at La Scala, had riled up all her lusts like a stiff wind in a pile of leaves, and reading “The Adventure of The Veiled Lodger” in a back issue of The Strand on the way home had worsened matters—for, where the picture was silly and melodramatic, the story was clever and thrilling and left Miss Grant longing for clients to visit her, to pour their agonies into her willing ear, to gasp in astonishment when she deduced all.

She would, she decided, put in some practice right here on the Perth to Pitlochry omnibus, just in case. Reading was making her feel rather seedy anyway.

Denise Mina

Limited Resources

by Denise Mina

…

I want to point out that Shirley is not a witch. She’s not psychic either, whatever the older ones say. She’s odd, but there’s room for that here.

Shirley likes being alone and she likes room to think. Those are good reasons for living here. She’s writing a book about why DNA evidence is wrong. She says it’s an ar,t not a science. Results may come from a lab but they still need subjective interpretation. Good science doesn’t require interpretation; it’s a series of observations leading to irrefutable conclusions. She doesn’t like leaps of logic. To be frank, that’s as much as I listened to—it’s dry stuff. Anyway, she came from Glasgow but she fits in perfectly here. There’s room for odd here.

At first people thought she was psychic. Shirley knew exactly what you had just been up to. She’d say she was ‘in purdah’, wherever that is, somewhere in her house I think, writing for weeks. She’d see no one and then she would meet you, out on a hill, walking past her garden, and she’d ask you weird psychic questions: Who drained your septic tank? How did your Golden Labrador die? She knew things.

The Spiritualist

by David Morrell

Again, the nightmare woke him. Again, he couldn’t go back to sleep.

As the bells of nearby Westminster Abbey sounded two o’clock, Conan Doyle rose from his bed. Always determined not to waste time, he considered going to the desk in his sitting room to write a few more thousand words, but instead his troubled mood prompted him to dress and go down the stairs. Careful not to wake his housekeeper, he unlocked the door and stepped outside.

A cold mist enveloped shadowy Victoria Street in the heart of metropolitan London. During the day, the rumble and rattle of motor vehicles reverberated off the area’s three-story buildings, but at this solitary hour, the only sound was the echo of Conan Doyle’s shoes as he reached the pavement and turned to the left, proceeding past dark shops.

Even in the night and the mist, the back of Westminster Abbey dominated, its hulking presence rising over him. He recalled his sense of irony a year earlier when he’d finally found a suitable location for the most important enterprise of his life, noting that it was only a stone’s throw from one of England’s most revered religious sites. He hadn’t spoken with His Grace about their competing views, but he suspected that the archbishop wasn’t amused.

My name is Sherry Watson. It’s a crap name, Sherry, I know. But what can you do? It’s not like I had a say in the matter. My parents, to give them credit, were trying to do the right thing—a sentimental gesture I wondered if they were sorry for after.

They named me after my godfather, who is—or was, before he vanished a year ago—a famous detective. All I have to say is it’s a good thing I wasn’t a boy, or I would really have something to be pissed off with him about. Actually, he’s responsible for a lot of things I should be pissed off about, my godfather, not the least of which was me standing in a freezing Scottish kitchen, up to my elbows in fish guts.

My godfather has a history of vanishing, so it wasn’t a big deal in the beginning. But the months went by with no word, no calls, no dropping in unexpectedly for dinner, then Mum and Dad getting more and more stony-faced and changing the subject whenever I asked about him. It was my last year at school and I was expecting at least the encouraging text now and again. I know my godfather supposedly doesn’t like women, but he never treated me like one. Like a girl, I mean. He helped with my science projects, quizzed me on my history, corrected my grammar—even in my texts. (Very annoying, I can tell you.)

Then, nothing.

The Adventure of the Extraordinary Rendition

by Cory Doctorow

…

Holmes buzzed me into his mansion flat above Baker Street Station without a word, as was his custom, but the human subconscious is a curious instrument. It can detect minute signals so fine that the conscious mind would dismiss them as trivialities. My subconscious picked up on some cue—the presence of a full stop in his text, perhaps: “Watson, I must see you at once.” Or perhaps he held down the door admission buzzer for an infinitesimence longer than was customary.

I endured unaccountable nerves on the ride up in the lift, whose smell reminded me as ever of Changi airport, hinting at both luxury and industry. Or perhaps I felt no nerves at all—I may be fooled by one of my memory’s many expert lies, its seamless insertion of the present-day’s facts into my recollections of the past. That easy facility with untruth is the reason for empiricism. No one, not even the storied Sherlock Holmes himself, can claim to have perfect recollection. It’s a matter of neuroanatomy. Why would your brain waste its precious, finite neurons on precise recall of the crunch of this morning’s toast when there are matters of real import that it must also store and track?

I had barely touched the polished brass knocker on flat 221 when the handle turned and the door flew open. I caught a momentary glimpse of Holmes’s aquiline features in the light from the hallway sconce before he turned on his heel and stalked back into the gloom of his vestibule, the tails of his mouse-colored dressing-gown swirling behind him as he disappeared into his study. I followed him, resisting the temptation to switch on a light to guide me through the long, dark corridor.

This third collection of “stories inspired by the Holmes canon” that Les Klinger and I have edited is out now, in hardback, e-, and next week, in audio. In celebration, and to tempt you into the mix, I thought I’d post a few tidbits from the stories. Here’s the first sampler…

Where There is Honey

by Dana Cameron

Writing settles my mind. Getting my the thoughts out of my head and onto the page, with the accompanying smell of ink and the scratch of the pen across fresh paper, has become a daily habit, especially when we are working on a case. Once committed to paper, my whirlwind thoughts cease to plague me so terribly. I hate the persistence of memory, questioning the actions I took or did not take on a case, what I observed or did not observe—, and always, what might have been. These “might have beens” stretch to eternity, a litany of failure. I have observed a marked lowness of spirits when I do not keep to this ritual, and so try to be constant in it. On some occasions, since my discharge from the army, I have found myself unnerved by new worries, and the ordering of my rampaging thoughts, corralling and quieting them, helps.

Indeed, I was busily writing when my friend Sherlock Holmes stalked into the room and hurled himself into a chair that late March evening just a few months after we took up residence there. I had hoped that he would presently close his eyes and doze, as he sometimes did after reviewing the successful completion of the day’s work, but it was not to be. He immediately leaped up again and began to pace, ignoring the brandy and gasogene, snapping his long fingers as if counting time in music or attempting to summon up a stray memory.

Many would have seen this as juvenile rude behavior. But for me, alarm bells began to ring. His tenseness often infected me, even as I worked diligently to keep to a quiet life to stave off those terrible spells that come over me, paralyzing and robbing me of all sense. Just But only this morning he had been bemoaning the swirling yellow fog and the prosaic dun-colored houses across the street.

“You’re writing, Watson.”

I remarked that his powers of observation had never been more acute.

Holmes on the Range: A Tale of the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository

by John Connolly

…

Extract from the manuscript (Caxton CD/ MSH 94: MS)

Holmes regarded Moriarty intensely, his every nerve aquiver. Before him sat the most dangerous man in England, a calculating, cold-blooded, criminal mastermind. For the first time in many years, Holmes felt real fear, even with a revolver cocked in his lap and concealed by a napkin.

“I hope the wine is to your liking,” said Moriarty.

“Have you poisoned it?” asked Holmes. “I hesitate even to touch the glass, in case you have treated it with some infernal compound of your own devising.”

“Why would I do that?” asked Moriarty. He appeared genuinely puzzled by the suggestion.

“You are my archnemesis,” Holmes replied. “You have hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain runs in your blood. Could I but free society of you, I should feel that my career had reached its summit.”

“Yes, about that archnemesis business…”

“What about it?” asked Holmes.

“Well, isn’t it a bit strange that it’s never come up before? I mean, if I’m your archnemesis, the Napoleon of crime, a spider at the heart of an infernal web with a thousand radiations, responsible for half that is evil in London—all that kind of thing—and you’ve been tracking me for years, then why haven’t you mentioned me before? You know, it would surely have popped up in conversation at some point. It’s not the kind of thing one tends to forget, really, is it, a criminal mastermind at the heart of some great conspiracy? If I were in your shoes, I’d never stop talking about me.”

“I—” Holmes paused. “I’ve never really thought about it in that way. I must admit that you did pop into my mind quite recently, and distinctly fully formed. Perhaps I took a blow to the head at some stage, although I’m sure Doctor Watson would have noted such an injury.”

“He writes down everything else,” said Moriarty. “Hard to see him missing something like that.”

This just in from Publishers Weekly about (next month’s!) Echoes of Sherlock Holmes:

King and Klinger’s strong third Sherlockian anthology (after 2014’s In the Company of Sherlock Holmes) features 17 stories from leading authors who draw on Conan Doyle’s work for inspiration. The end result is a rich variety of entries, including Tony Lee and Bevis Musson’s “Mrs. Hudson Investigates,” a post-Reichenbach mystery in comic book format. David Morrell sensitively examines Conan Doyle’s obsession with spiritualism in “The Spiritualist,” in which the writer has an unexpected encounter in London’s Psychic Book Shop, Library and Museum. John Connolly displays his gift for subtle satire in “Holmes on the Range,” set in his Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository, a home for fictional characters who have “assumed an objective reality” (including Holmes and Watson). Another high point is William Kent Krueger’s “The Painted Smile,” in which a therapist treats a child determined to have his identification with Holmes taken seriously. Other contributors include Anne Perry, Hallie Ephron, and Gary Phillips.

The first mystery conference I ever attended was in London, in 1990. At the time, I had a separate agent for the English/Commonwealth market, and she happened to mention that there was this conference that I might go to…

Because it coincided with family stuff, I went. And found it interesting, and informative, and more than a little intimidating.

This was the first year BoucherCon was held out of the US. (It returned to the UK five years later, in Nottingham—which, as it happened, was the second fan conference I ever attended. I’ve been a bit more regular since then.) It was held in King’s College, London

which was great fun and very central, but probably the worst venue imaginable for the purpose of an international crime conference, particularly for a new writer. (I wasn’t published until 1993.) I knew no one, and I was staying with family out in West London, so the only place I encountered people were on the stairs and corridors, of which there seemed a huge number. There was no central place to hang out and awkwardly venture a conversation, other than the student cafeteria, which was a long and winding set of hallways distant.

(Not a King’s College hallway…)

As I remember, the book room was smushed into a sort of wide passageway. The only event I remember after all these years was an interview of PJ James, during which Q&A a decidedly odd lady in a houndstooth cape and deerstalker cap held up a dog hand puppet and announced, “Sherlock Hound wants to know, why did you use Devices and Desires as the title of one book and a chapter title in another?”

(Is my memory of the author eyeing the exit and clutching her handbag factual, or interpretive?)

and a bunch of the authors will be there with their pens. But primarily, the company of readers is fabulous and the panels will be way cool. Such as the one I’m sharing with five other woman and Andrew Grant (who promises he looks quite fetching in a corset. I’m still waiting to see the promised photograph.)

PW chose it as one of their top ten mysteries for the fall, and now Kirkus reviews loves them some Echoes of Sherlock Holmes, too:

“Inspired” is the key word here, for contributors have been encouraged to interpret their remit even more broadly than in the editors’ previous two collections (In the Company of Sherlock Holmes, 2014, etc.).John Connolly sets the tone by confronting Holmes and Watson, enshrined in a magical library after Holmes’ death, with their inferior post-Reichenbach avatars. David Morrell, Jonathan Maberry, and William Kent Krueger walk similar metafictional tightropes when they arrange debates between Arthur Conan Doyle and a spectral Holmes over spiritualism, bring C. Auguste Dupin to console Watson at Holmes’ empty grave, and present a child-psychologist Watson providing therapy to a boy who believes he’s Sherlock Holmes. Other contributors briskly update the Great Detective. Meg Gardiner‘s sleuth investigates a breach in computer security; Hank Phillippi Ryan‘s Annabelle Holmes follows a trail of pictogram emails to a missing fiancee; Gary Phillips‘ Sherlock, in a rayon shirt and bell-bottoms, investigates the assassination of an iconic civil rights leader; Cory Doctorow explores the problem of a conscience-driven leaker of secret intelligence. Meanwhile, back in the Victorian era, Tasha Alexander sketches a deft and funny prequel to “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Dana Cameron‘s free-wheeling Watson recounts Holmes’ search for a hidden legacy, and Tony Lee and Bevis Musson give Mrs. Hudson a thimble-sized comic-book case more notable for visual style than narrative invention. Sherlock is channeled by Catriona McPherson‘s lady’s maid, Deborah Crombie‘s cheeky goddaughter Sherry Watson, Anne Perry’s TV Holmes, Denise Mina‘s not-a-witch Shirley, and Michael Scott‘s Dublin madam, who assists the police in their investigation of a celebrated real-life theft. Although most of these tales are more notable for their high concepts than the ways they’re worked out, Hallie Ephron‘s tale of a movie actress who once played Irene Adler and is now understudying a much younger Irene is a delight from beginning to end. Though the level of inspiration in individual stories varies widely, every fan will find different reasons to cheer. And they’ll all marvel at the inventive range of this salute to the greatest of all fictional detectives.

Back in 2009, Les Klinger was in charge of the Left Coast Crime Sherlock Holmes panel. And being Les, he did not go just for the usual suspects (ie, me) but for guests of honor Jan Burke and Lee Child, and multiple prize winner Michael Connelly as well.

Afterwards, a little light went on in his fevered brain and he said to me, What if you and I edited a collection of Holmes stories written by people who aren’t known to be Holmes aficionados? The result of that came in 2011: A Study in Sherlock. Three years later, we did a second volume, In the Company of Sherlock Holmes. Those two books had a number of nominations and awards, including the 2015 Anthony.

The stories here range wide, as you might expect with authors from Cory Doctorow to Anne Perry, Gary Philips to Tasha Alexander, William Kent Krueger to Catriona McPherson, David Morrell to—well, look at the entire flabbergasting list of contributors here. These are amazing writers, who play the Sherlockian game with panache and brilliance.